Information about Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager started to leak out into the industry before Microsoft could make an official announcement at their WinHEC conference in Seattle.

Early on, we had tidbits of information about a management product codenamed Carmine, which was later erroneously dubbed Virtual Server Manager. Now that the WinHEC conference has started, official word from Microsoft is coming out, and the product now known as Virtual Machine Manager is starting to take shape. It appears the product is scheduled for a public Beta 1 release sometime during the summer of 2006, followed by a Beta 2 release around Q1 of 2007, and finally, an RTM of the product sometime in the second half of 2007.

With the announcement of an early beta launch of the product, it looks as though Microsoft may have shifted gears. Prior to the announcement, it was believed that the product would only be offered with the upcoming release of codename Viridian. However, support is officially being offered for virtualization hosts running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or later.

The product is offering some of the most requested features that virtualization administrators have been patiently waiting for such as physical resource optimization and rapid provisioning.

Physical Resource Optimization - Virtual Machine Manager delivers simple and complete support for consolidating physical hardware on virtual infrastructure and optimizing utilization. It includes:

• Simple identification of consolidation candidates - The first step to consolidation is to identify the appropriate physical workloads for consolidation onto virtual hardware. The Virtual Machine Manager leverages the existing historical performance data in the System Center Operations Manager database to list the consolidation candidates in rank order.


• Fast and reliable P2V - Virtual Machine Manager uses block based differencing technology and the Volume Shadow Copy Service to help convert the virtual machine at disk speed.


• Intelligent placement - To maximize the utilization of physical assets, the product takes various data into account and then intelligently places the virtual workload onto the appropriate physical host server.


• Centralized resource optimization - Virtual Machine Manager enables centralized changes to help tune resources within each physical host server. It also enables simple migration of a virtual machine from one physical server to another to optimize resources via workload migration.

Rapid Provisioning and Agility - Virtual Machine Manager provides rapid provisioning of virtual machines from physical machines, templates in the image library, or by end-users.

• Central library - Virtual Machine Manager provides a complete library to centralize and manage virtual hard disks, ISO images, hardware configurations, as well as template images.
• Self service provisioning - The end user is presented with a very simple web page that enables virtual machine provisioning within controlled presets identified by the administrator.
• Industry standard storage infrastructure - Virtual Machine Manager employs a distributed storage architecture on industry standard hardware and network infrastructures. It offers the ability to centrally manage the images while locating images most closely to where they will be deployed.
• Host provisioning - Virtual Machine Manager will identify the physical virtual hosts in the enterprise by discovery in Active Directory by having the administrator group all of the virtual hosts into an OU and pointing Virtual Machine Manager to that OU to discover and setup virtual hosts.

To read the product's overview, click here. And to read the product's FAQ, click here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 23, 2006 01:55 PM